1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to automated customer support and service in a distributed computing environment and more particularly to a method of reducing a number of “live” support calls by providing intelligent, guided self-help in such an environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Technical support services and programs are designed to diagnose and solve hardware or software problems that users and/or customers encounter as they use computers. As businesses continue to move on-line, distributed computing environments become more complex and, thus, more difficult to troubleshoot. Indeed, entire businesses now desire to connect their critical business systems directly to employees, customers, vendors and other important constituencies. To this end, many internal or external business network applications are now being connected to the Internet's World Wide Web to make the information accessible from anywhere using conventional browser software.
Traditional technical support centers place their emphasis on internal tracking and productivity tools, such as problem tracking systems. Such “back end” systems exist internally to the support organization and are usually transparent to the customer. Although back-end systems aid internal efficiency, they do little for the actual problem resolution process itself. Problem resolution is typically left to telephony-based technologies such as agent-based automatic call distribution (ACD) support centers and intelligent voice response (IVR) devices.
Such techniques attempt to diagnose and address problems on a remote node without actually having the technician travel to that node. The most common method of technical support is still a telephone conversation with tech support personnel. Other known techniques involve a network “login” to the remote node so that the conditions may be evaluated from the technical support center's viewpoint. The network connection may be used to run a diagnostic program on the remote node, or “self-help” fix-it programs may be downloaded to the remote note and executed there.
With the explosive growth of the Internet, yet another approach has become quite popular. This approach involves having the user access a Web server with support content in the form of support notes or FAQs. The user attempts to use this information to “self service” his or her own problem. On its face, this strategy appears sensible as, theoretically, an effective self-service strategy would let users solve problems for themselves (e.g., through a Web browser), with the result of lower call volumes and better service. Unfortunately, however, using the Web as a publishing medium has not resulted in the desired benefits. Indeed, call avoidance has often evolved into “customer avoidance”. In particular, most normal users do not want to be “detectives” who have to make a set of guesses about the precise search strings that will get them to the right support solutions. Further, it is quite frustrating for users who cannot solve their problems (by self-service) to then be forced to go through the tedious exercise of later repeating to a support engineer information concerning their self-service attempts. The result is that end users often feel like their vendor is trying to push them away, with the inevitable result that this unintended result may actually occur.
Indeed, studies have shown that, even when a user knows an answer exists to his or her problem, he or she will be able to find the answer only 40% of the time. Further, many “answers” have very complex diagnoses and resolutions that are well beyond the capabilities of most computer users.
The present invention addresses this problem.